Show, Don't Tell: Heavy reliance on visuals and no written words.

Shout-Out: The book contains a number of visual references to famous images and landmarks, such as the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Titanic newsboy.

Ridiculously Cute Critter: The odd mouse-tadpole thing ◊ that the Immigrant befriends over the course of the book.

No Name Given: None of the characters are named.

Funny Foreigner: The protagonist, at first and from the point of view of others.

Fish out of Water: A persistent motif is that the protagonist spends most of the story deeply confused by the strange habits, rules and material culture of the city he has moved to.

Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: Even the everyday food of the new city is strange instead of regular foodstuffs that he expected, the nameless protagonist has to learn how to recognize and prepare a variety of bizarre, elaborately contorted fruits and vegetables.

The protagonist soon picks up one of his own.

Empathy Pet: A common feature for the citizens of the Immigrants' new city, as many of the people we see are accompanied by whimsical-looking fantasy creatures.

Book Ends: Near the beginning of the novel, the confused protagonist asks a stranger for directions at its end, his daughter gives directions to a newcomer.

An Immigrant's Tale: The story follows an immigrant struggling to learn the ways of his new land, with the twist that the place he's immigrating to (and the one he's immigrating from) isn't at all real.

This work contains examples of the following tropes: No relation to either the 1996 film with Charlie Sheen in the lead role, or the better-known 2016 film Arrival, headlined by Amy Adams.

Drawn in beautiful hyper-realism, the book incorporates fantastical landscapes and an invented alphabet to convey the confusions of a new place and unfamiliar language. A wordless graphic novel by Shaun Tan about a nameless immigrant in a strange land.

The arrival picture book